What’s next after a Nobel? It’s a surprise.

Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a Mass General researcher, was the center of attention Monday among Harvard and hospital colleagues after receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his role in the discovery of microRNA.

Ruvkun, who shared the prize with his longtime collaborator Victor Ambros, formerly of Harvard and today a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, waved to fellow researchers and cracked a few jokes during a news conference at Mass General, not too far away from his lab at the Richard B. Simches Research Center.

Ruvkun was born in Berkeley, California, in 1952, and earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982, and became a principal investigator at Mass General and at the Medical School in 1985. Ruvkun and Ambros were Harvard colleagues when they began to collaborate on studies of the role played by two genes, lin-4 and lin-14, in regulating abnormal development in the roundworm C. elegans.

In work conducted at Harvard and published in 1993, Ambros cloned C. elegans’ lin-4 gene and found that it did not code for a protein, as most other genes did. Instead, it encoded a very small strand of RNA, just 22 bases long. Next, Ruvkun discovered a tiny RNA string with the ability to bind to lin-14’s messenger RNA, large molecules that carry genetic information from the gene to the cell’s ribosome, where the information gets translated into protein. By disrupting this process, the microRNA disrupted the gene’s expression and affected development.

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